
ECOTERRA Intl. declared: After the gathering of parts and products of the natural fauna, the hunting of species of the natural fauna is one of humankind's oldest cultural forms to safeguard survival and sustainance as well as to provide for livelihoods and development. As such hunting and gathering still has its rightful place in the aboriginal cultures of genuinely indigenous peoples the world over, who live and want to live in free self-determination such lives in their traditional culture.
However, most mainstream societies of those states represented in the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) today have abandoned genuine hunting of wild animals - with the exception of the traditional fisheries sector - as well as the purposeful and free-ranging gathering of natural plants and plant products - with the exemption of the traditional forestry sector - and engaged in later developed forms of economic activities and productivity to sustain their livelihoods. Modern societies developed not only alternative forms of primary production by engaging in domesticated livestock husbandry, altered plant agriculture and plantation forestry, but strive today - in some parts already mainly - in the secondary and tertiary sectors of economy to make their living.
The killing of wild animals therefore can only be termed hunting, if carried out by members of traditional strata of aboriginal hunter and gatherer cultures or individuals and groups, who have fully reverted to that culture and lifestyle - to live it consequently as their main economic activity and in their own, unalienable rights. In southern Africa groups of the First Nation of the aboriginal San (bushmen) are an example of a genuinely lived and unbroken hunter-gatherer culture, though genocidal actions and other atrocities directed against these indigenous peoples have been and still are committed since 1702 by those strata, which make out the mainstream society in South Africa (SA) today.
If the killing of wildlife is carried out by non-aboriginal cultures, the legal or illegal off-take of wild animals from the natural ecosystems and even more so from ranched populations of animals under human stewardship of non-domesticated and/or non-domestic species can never be termed "hunting" and consequently must be called by its true name: the KILLING of wild animals or the CULLING of whole segments of a wildlife population or even ECOCIDE if a whole population is wiped out. All such must end.
ECOTERRA Intl. demands to immediately stop any canned Lion killing in South Africa and elsewhere and all United Nations member states who are signatories to CITES to immediately raise the status of Lions (panthera leo) to endangered.